Revisiting The Hierarchy Of Effectiveness

What areas should sportsbooks prioritize? Today's feature column looks at the five key areas of running a sportsbook and their order of importance.

“A person aggressively using a brick is more dangerous than someone armed with a gun, used timidly and incompetently.”

Iain Abernethy

A few years back, I penned an article titled Sports Betting and the Hierarchy of Effectiveness – the article is currently behind the Gaming Law Review paywall.

Legal sports betting was in its infancy at the time, and now, a few years on, my views have slightly changed, or more accurately, updated with new information.

The original article attempted to answer the question, what goes into a successful sports betting app?

Several years later, I think a better way of approaching the subject is to examine what different customer types prioritize and how operators can create a successful sports betting business.

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Customer Profiles

There are countless types of sports bettors, but to keep this column under 10,000 words, I’ll provide a quick summary of each of the three categories pertinent to this article.

The Prospect – Prospects are the lifeblood of any online gambling site. Prospects are customers who don’t even know they are customers; they need a nudge. If you want a simple definition of a Prospect, look no further than the pre-sports betting databases of Fanatics and ESPN. Once they take the plunge, the Prospect becomes an Explorer.

The Explorer – Explorers (a term I stole from Kim Lund) are relatively new to online gambling. They are in the process of trying different sites and products. Unlike a Prospect, Explorers are already in the ecosystem; they just haven’t found their place. Most Explorers become recreational bettors, and some become Sophisticates.

The Sophisticate – Sophisticates are exactly that: experienced, sophisticated bettors. They understand all the products and even the industry - think Gambling Twitter. An example of a Sophisticate is someone who has been gambling offshore and is now looking to move their money into the legal market – if it makes sense to make that transition. 

The Hierarchy of Effectiveness

As I previously wrote, “At some point in time, you’ve likely encountered the Hierarchy of Effectiveness. The one I’m most familiar with comes from martial arts as it relates to self-defense. The version I prefer was created by Dennis Martin and made popular by Iain Abernethy.”

The pyramid is shaped as follows.

In self-defense terms:

• Mindset = Aggressiveness

• Strategy = The general plan

• Tactics = If x happens, I’ll do y

• Technique = Training

• Kit = The items available to use.

The first two layers are the essential parts. Per Abernethy, his friend Steve Williams said:

“In all his years working in the prison service, he had never heard a criminal describe the specifics of how they intend to approach a violent situation. Ask a martial artist how they would deal with a given scenario, and you will often get a detailed and technical answer. Ask a criminal the same question, and you get something along the lines of, “I’d smash the ######!” or “I’d #### them up.”

That’s mindset and strategy. Criminals use mindset and a simple but effective strategy. Think of a football team that plans to run it down the opposing team’s throats, not tactics and technique to set up a play-action pass or reverse by first doing x, y, and z.

As Abernethy has said, “A person aggressively using a brick (high mindset, low kit) would be more dangerous than the person armed with a gun, used timidly and incompetently (high kit, low on everything else).”

Yes, the person with a gun is still dangerous. They are a serious threat. But given the choice, I’ll take my chances with that person (someone I can talk to and reason with) over a desperate person with a brick who has surprised me while my head is down looking at my phone.

Applying the Pyramid to Sports Betting

For sports betting, the categories can be broken down as follows.

• Mindset = Corporate culture, leadership, and clear long-term goals.

• Strategy = The plan of attack and enough confidence to stick to the plan.

• Tactics = The execution of the plan - promotions, advertising, customer service.

• Technique = The details: Markets on offer, limiting/banning winners, and lines.

• Kit = The product. Your platform and backend.

And keep in mind that they are all important. Food might be at the bottom of a pyramid containing air, water, and food, but it’s still pretty damn important.  

My (Original) Sports Betting Hierarchy of Effectiveness

During the early days of legal US sports betting, I struggled to rank kit, the product. In some respects, I thought it was the most critical factor. A solid team with a solid plan is useless if the product is subpar. Similarly, a superior sports betting product needs a leadership team to deploy it.